Tonight’s episode just ended, and I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. I do think it was a big improvement over last week in the sense that things actually happened, although some of the developments were so weird, cheesy, or silly that I hesitate to call it a great episode.
I wasn’t really *surprised *that the writers chickened out and decided to make Rachel’s pregnancy scare a false alarm, but I didn’t expect them to handwave it away so quickly. We didn’t even get any sort of discussion about contraception, which seems particularly egregious since Rachel’s boyfriend is a prostitute.
Speaking of Captain Sleazypants, I was kind of disappointed that Finn didn’t just beat him to death. (Santana could have helped him hide the body.) He’s a boring character, and murder is one of the few soap opera twists this show hasn’t pulled yet.
I did like that we got a Unique storyline for once. She’s mostly just been around to sing this season, and up until this point the show had largely ignored the likelihood that an openly transgender student would be teased, bullied, or even just considered weird or confusing by others at school. It wasn’t that long ago that Kurt was getting tossed in the Dumpster every morning by the football team, and Unique seems like an even more obvious target than Kurt ever was.
I was expecting a totally predictable revelation that Finn 2.0 (who seemed more Finn-like than ever this week – he said something insensitive to a minority, but learned a valuable lesson!) had been chatting with Unique all along, but the identity of the [person posing as the] blonde girl online was not revealed. If it was Unique, it seems odd to drag that out past this episode. So who was it? Since the request for a racy photo from Finn 2.0 seemed like a setup for future blackmail then Quinn 2.0 seems a likely candidate. But since this is Glee, it could very well be someone who makes less sense than that. I have a crazy theory I’ll put in a spoiler box because it rests on information from the teaser for next week rather than anything in this episode.
The teaser showed Blaine and Sam talking, and Blaine said something like “Wait, are you saying you have feelings for me?” While I’d give decent odds that this is just fanfiction bait and nothing will really come of it, maybe Sam is bicurious/questioning/a big closet case and has been posing as a girl online to flirt with guys…and decided he could also use his alter ego to help mend fences within the glee club.
I thought the boy-band mash-up was weird. Especially because Mr. Shue is a grown-ass adult and Finn is barely out of high school.
The whole show skeeves me out now. I only watched last night’s episode (well, fast-forwarded about 90% of it) because I forgot to delete the PVR timer and out of morbid curiosity. Won’t make that mistake again.
Yeah, one reason I was hoping the confrontation would end in murder was that then there’d be little chance of the show spinning this as Finn being the white knight hero defending dumb, helpless little woman Rachel. I’m afraid that’s where this is going, though. Had Rachel’s creepy boyfriend been beating her then it might have been understandable, if still, ya know, criminal, for Finn to kick the guy’s ass, but Hulking out on your ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend because he’s lying to her/having sex with other women is psycho.
Ignoring the moral implications of Finn teleporting to New York just to assault a prostitute, I didn’t buy that Santana would have gone to him for help with this situation. It would have been more in-character for her to just threaten (or even fight) the guy herself, or if she wanted a plan that actually made sense and wasn’t violent she could have hidden Kurt in the bathroom to prove to him she was right and then he could have talked to Rachel.
I found it both weird and confusing; I didn’t get until the end whether the scenes of them physically fighting were symbolic and the sing-off was real or the fighting was real and the sing-off was symbolic. I also hated '90s boy bands the first time around and don’t like them any better as nostalgia. I will however give Glee credit for making an episode where, possibly for the first time in the history of the show, characters attempted to solve a problem through a musical number but it didn’t work.
That was the highlight for me as well. Thank goodness Kurt dropped in for that one scene.
I will say that while I still don’t give a damn about the 2.0s, this episode did at least manage to come up with a moderately interesting plot for them rather than making it just yet another installment of “Oh no, I’m a pretty girl and two handsome boys like me! What shall I do?”
They actually have done that already, just a couple of episodes back – Quinn slept with Santana, and said afterward that she was glad she’d tried it but wasn’t interested in doing it again. Although they promptly had sex a second time, so there’s some room to question whether Quinn really was just “experimenting”.
They’ve had Brittany and Santana all over the place, with Puck and Finn and each other, before settling down to be straight or bi. They’ve never even come close to this for the male members of Glee. They’ve either been straight or gay, with nothing in between.
I’m going to stop spoilering things related to previous episodes, although I’ll try to be careful about not giving away things from the teaser for next week.
In season two Blaine did briefly wonder if he was bisexual, but since that came to nothing in the end it doesn’t count for much.
If they do decide to have a bisexual male character I actually hope it isn’t… Sam, just because I think that would undermine their portrayal of him as a regular straight dude who’s totally cool with gay dudes. I’d have no problem with there being a bi guy on Glee, but they shouldn’t sacrifice a straight ally to create one.
But if Finn 2.0 and Puck Jr. wanted to turn their bromance into a romance then that would at least make them more interesting. Last week in that odd “Unchained Melody” scene where Rachel 2.0 imagined herself watching Finn 2.0 at the potter’s wheel with her other imaginary self, I actually briefly thought they were going to show her fantasizing about watching Puck Jr. and Finn 2.0 together.
Nah. They need to have Jr/2.0 around and accessible for the tween girls to sigh and drool over, saying they know they could fix the damage they both have, and marry THEM ::squeeeel!::
It would have to be disposable characters with little future plot times, like the graduating seniors, or Rory and Dreadlock Guy. There’s little chance that the superstars of NEXT season could do something like that.
Now, they COULD have Puck Sr. do that, because he’s a slut that sleeps around, AND his character is disposable, but it would wreck the storyline with Bitch Cheerleader.
I mean, ferFSMsake, they just had SUE come out and sing, in order to get her some plot time. Totally ridiculous, not in character, but gave the Jane Lynch fans something to see.
Then again, its Glee. Next week, they could all turn Amish for the day.
I would bet money that a lot of adolescent girls would be very, very happy to watch a show about two hunky bisexual football players.
Sue has sung before, although not recently. I think her last musical number was her duet of “Ohio” with her mother (Carole Burnett) back in season two.